The computer-aided simulation of electrical circuits has attained increasing importance in the development of very large circuits, that is to say circuits having a very large number of elements. It is particularly in the development of computer chips having a multiplicity, for example several hundred thousand transistors, that serial processing for the determination of the circuit quantities by a computer has been found to be unusable because of the excessive time consumption.
In WO 98/24039, therefore, it is proposed to partition a large circuit and to have the partitions processed by different computers in each case.
In the calculation, the operating point, that is to say the potentials of all nodes is usually determined first as basis for further analyses such as, for example, transient or alternating-current analyses.
For the parallel calculation, an implementation of the Newton method is proposed in U. Wever, Q. Zheng et al.: “Domain Decomposition Methods for Circuit Simulation” (Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation, PADS '94 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, pp. 183–186, July 1994) and in U. Wever, Q. Zheng: “Parallel Transient Analysis for Circuit Simulation” (Proceedings of the 29th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 442–447, 1996). The disadvantage is that convergence can only be achieved here when sufficiently good estimates of the operating point are available, due to poor convergence characteristics. As a rule, however, such good estimates can be achieved with difficulty or not at all in the case of large circuits.